It's not released yet, but there's a Lenovo blog post confirming that it is happening, and there has been a sneaky picture or two on El Reg as well. Not sure of all the details of it mind you, but the classic keyboard and a none-16:9 screen are pretty much confirmed.

Well, I've just bought a NUC for myself. Core i5-7260U (trying to bodge Windows 7 onto this will be fun!), 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD and a 2TB rust spinner for data. Should arrive in a week's time, so I can have some fun trying to get it running, migrate everything over from my Mac Mini, and hopefully get some seamless RDP stuff working from my SGI machines via a VM I can run on it.

Of course, remembering that HMRC had pinched nearly £3,000 too much tax from me not long ago - meaning a hefty refund a couple of weeks back has meant my bank balance looking considerably more healthy than I expected, so I thought I'd treat myself

Trippynet wrote:Replace my Mac Mini: My Mac Mini is an old Core 2 Duo system from about 2008. It runs 24/7 as a BitTorrent machine plus dues a bit of file serving as well, but it won't run any more modern Windows than XP, and it's as maxed out with RAM/HDD as I can realistically get it.

Are you sure about the XP thing? While the Core i5 NUC you ordered obviously will run Windows better than an old Mac mini, AFAIK all Intel Mac minis can run newer versions of Windows than XP, either officially or via unofficial installation methods. Even the Core Solo models can run 32 bit Windows 7 (and possibly 8.1, IIRC) with some installation tweaking.

Windows 7 did install on it, but it misbehaved in a number of ways. It used to hang for nearly 5 minutes during bootup, I experienced semi-regular lockups from it in use, used to take absolutely ages to shut down, etc. Tried updating all the drivers, installing the latest Apple BootCamp bits on it, no good In short, it never really got on well with Windows 7. Popped XP back on (which was still under support when I did this), and it ran like a dream again. I also spent several days trying to persuade it to run Linux Mint, without success.

Despite XP being EOL for a while, I've been keeping it updated with the POS updates, but overall it has been growing increasingly dated. My desire to run a Windows Server VM on it to allow seamless RDP from IRIX has made me decide to replace it. I'll probably keep the ol' Mac Mini around, but it's more likely to be used in future for booting into MacOS and running Garageband and the likes.

If this turns out to be accurate and it's still a 16:9 screen - and a buttonless touchpad as well for that matter (and I'm not seeing any status LEDs either), then I'll be keeping my credit card in my pocket. I do NOT want a crappy, cheapo watching-TV-oriented 16:9 panel on my laptop - period. Apple manage to make 16:10 laptops still, and both Microsoft and Huawei make laptops with 3:2 screens, so there's obviously companies producing these.

Looks to me as if they've just taken a T470 and put the classic keyboard onto it along with a few fancy stickers. It takes more than this to make a proper "retro" ThinkPad.

Like I say, hope I'm wrong, but if not then it'll be a huge disappointment that I won't be buying after all.

Does anybody actually like modern lenovos, with their touchstrip in place of fn-keys, garbage trackpoint buttons, garbage trackpads, spyware bundled software, garbage keyboards?

If you really want a laptop made the way "they used to be made" get a toughbook, and don't complain about the price or the performance!

The rest of the world moved on to macbooks, razers, and even dells years ago.

This machine just looks cheap anyways: cheap hinge, cheap display (only FHD for 2017??!?), no light, only one TB3 port, and I really think if they are going to waste the space on an ethernet jack in this day and age it should be 10gbe.

They put an old keyboard style on a new machine, rather than putting modern tech and ports into an old (e.g. t410-era) chassis. And for the size of the thing it shouldn't have a 15w cpu. Even my x220 had a 'big-boy' chip for back in the day.

Trippynet wrote:I do NOT want a crappy, cheapo watching-TV-oriented 16:9 panel on my laptop - period. Apple manage to make 16:10 laptops still, and both Microsoft and Huawei make laptops with 3:2 screens

This I don't understand. Why get so angry at Lenovo, and instead just buy an (Apple/Microsoft/Huawei)? If that's your sword to fall on there are plenty of options in the screen department.

They got rid of the touchstrip and the fake trackpoint buttons, and many users, myself included, and don't care about the trackpad when there's a TrackPoint available. The spyware is sucky, but if you expect the factory installed software on a laptop not to include spyware from either the manufacturer or the OS vendor, I think you need to take a look at just how valuable personal data is these days. The stand-out part was when they were injecting it from the BIOS a-la Computrace persistence module, and it never affected Linux anyway. I am in agreement that the modern keyboard layout is garbage.

While I prefer 4:3 or 3:2, I honestly don't mind 16:9. Really, I'm pretty happy with the prospect of a T470 with a better keyboard. Heck, I would probably be perfectly happy with a regular T470 as well.

Excepting network drivers and razer synapse (which is optional), neither one of those machines comes with anything above and beyond a default OS load out, if you had downloaded a clean image from microsoft or apple.